Iraq Admits Work On Nuclear Bomb

Yahoo UK ^ | Monday December 9, 08:23 AM

[idkfa]

Iraq Admits Work On Nuclear Bomb

Iraq's dossier on its weapons programmes has arrived at the United Nations in New York - as Iraq admits it had begun work on making a nuclear bomb.But Iraqi officials said the work was in its development stage and no nuclear bomb was ever made.

UN experts got down to work on analysing Iraq's declaration of its arms programmes after the bulky report of almost 12,000 pages arrived at UN offices from Baghdad.

Plan

"Even tonight, as we look at it, we can probably plan some of the work that is going to be done," Hans Blix, executive chairman of the UN arms inspection agency UNMOVIC, said.

"We will immediately take a look at that and get an overview of how many pages are printed and how much do we get in CD-ROMS, and tomorrow we will get copies made of the declaration and we will start to work," Blix added.

Separately, the nuclear section of the dossier arrived at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, where nuclear experts began studying it.

Bomb

In Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein's adviser said the declaration proved Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction - but he suggested Baghdad may have been close to developing a nuclear bomb.

"We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things. We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it," Amir al-Saadi said.

"It is for the IAEA to judge how close we were," he added.

[spetznaz]

I wonder what will happen if the UN inspectors come up with no viable evidence of WMD in Iraq? And this is not to say there are none because all logic points to Saddam possessing types of weapons that are categorically banned for Iraq! However Iraq is a pretty big place, and there are a myriad of places a government could hide incriminating evidence.

Hence there is a chance, and a good one, that the UN inspectors will come up with nothing and their whole mission will be to no avail! After all Saddam had years to hide any stuff he had.

And if the inspectors come up empty, will that put a stopper to the plans for war? Especially when you consider that only the US and Britain agree on war when it comes to the permanent members of the security council, with the other permanent members (and the UN at large) applying strict resolution protocol to any war with Iraq ...meaning that if no incriminatung stuff is found then no war.

Although i guess the simple thing to do is for us and Britain to just whoop Saddam's @$$ ....however it would be so much easier if some 'naughty' weapon was found in Iraq!

Anyways what do you people think? What will be the fallout if no concrete proof is found by the inspectors?

[Gunrunner2]

Saddam doesn't know what we know and have proof of.
The UN inspectors don't know what we know and have proof of.
Therefore, Saddam is playing a game, admitting some stuff and hoping the UN inspectors will take the bone thrown to them.
The UN inspection people will look silly if they say Iraq only has the stuff they admitted to.
Hans Blix is an appeaser, he doesn't want to submit a report that would give justification to destroy Saddam, no matter the evidence.
So, expect some watered down report that lists only what Iraq admits to, and expect the report to say "nope, nothing wrong here that a good stern word couldn't fix." (Right now you can bet Blix and his boys are doing some fast editing to make sure their report matces what is in the Iraqi report.)
In any event, Iraq and the UN will look dumb.

[swarthyguy]

Cheney called it the inspection trap before he stopped saying antiUNinspection statements in his speeches.

The only out is that the US has conclusive evidence and that this is just a lengthy snail pace process of handing Saddam enough rope.

Bush cannot afford to have Saddam in office in 2004.

THe other scenario is a a coup that'll negate the need for an Iraqi invasion. That's what i think the real goal is.
All this military prep is the equivalent of Patton's army in England before D-Day.